I bought the Network Adapter for my PS2 today, I got it for £19.99 which I thought was fairly reasonable. This evening I got it out of the packaging (no mean feat in itself!) and fitted it on the PS2. Then I opened the instructions and saw that I needed the model and serial number of my console to register my adapter. I took off the network adapter again as it covers these numbers, wrote them down and replaced it. I ran a network cable from my router to the PS2 put in the Network Access Disk and booted the machine.

It loaded and I followed the steps to configure the adapter. I ran the network diagnostic test and it passed. I tried to connect to “Central Station” (the homepage of PS2 online) and it failed. I tried several more times and every time it failed. I created another connection and again it passed the network diagnostics but failed to connect to Central Station. At this point I assumed (incorrectly) that perhaps Pipex didn’t support PS2 online. I did a spot of googling and didn’t find any useful answers, I even tried the playstation website and that was no good either.

Then I tried searching for the error message. I found a page that explained the problem and showed me how to fix it. It appears that Sony made a bit of a cock-up with the browser software for PS2 Online and it has trouble reading from memory cards. I’m amazed that this sort of error made it passed testing at Sony but I’m glad I finally got my machine connected. Once I got to Central Station I had to register a “handle” obviously my usual pseudonyms were taken, no matter what leetery I tried. So I settled for imagecircus. I had to give them my address, email, date of birth, home and mobile number. Eventually I should receive a pin number in the post that will confirm my registration and fully activate my account.

After having finally got all of that setup I was looking forward to playing Need for Speed online. I loaded it up tinkered with my car a little and tried to get online. It couldn’t find the network settings. Apparently NSFU can only read from Memory Card Slot 1, what a pain. My game settings are on one card and the network settings are on the other. So I’ll have to create network settings on both cards eventually as copying them across didn’t work. Why won’t they just release the HDD already? There’s an empty HDD bay in the back of all the PS2’s out there just waiting to be filled with a 60 giger. In the meantime I connected with only the stock cars just to test it out.

Then I had to register with EA to play on their server. That’s madness, I thought you’d register once and that’d be it. I never expected to register per game or per publisher. I couldn’t even register imagecircus as a handle on EA’s server so I settled for IanWright83, imaginative huh?! Eventually I got online, I challenged someone to a race and they accepted. We raced and I was winning until I hit a tram, I lost by 1 second exactly. Hmph!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2004 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.